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A blog about analytics and music

Spotify Related Artists App

A while back I created an R package to pull data out of the Spotify API and turn it into a d3.js visualisation. Here is the blogpost. I’ve started to teach myself Python and I’ve now re-built this process with it. The exciting part is, as it’s in Python I can use the Google App Engine to create an app that hosts the code online. That means anyone can generate a related artists visualisation. Hurray! Have a go yourself by following this link

To find out more about how its done read on…
I learnt some basic Python using code academy. Then taking some lessons from when I built this in R, I decided rather than mess about with the data in data frames, the important bit is to create the json for the data. So this time I just iterate through the results adding them to my json string. It’s much quicker now. I used the urllib package to pull in from the API and json package to convert into the json data form.

I already knew about the google app engine after reading this blogpost. Next I went through their online tutorial. It explains how to use webapp2 to make your process work as a web page. Then the Handling Forms section explains about requesting data using; RequestHandler with the get option, and then pushing back out the results with the RequestHandler post option.